an hour was, she frequently assured him, so romantic, and so sexy—and on most Sunday nights after the kids went to bed, she showed him exactly how much she appreciated the gesture.
But that was for later, Hank reminded himself, pouring the coffee, which went on the tray next to the freshly buttered bread. Most mornings he was able to almost reach their bed before Katie rolled over and gave him a sleepy smile. This she did now.
“What’s for breakfast?” she asked, smiling.
“Take a guess.”
“Ah, my favorite.” She sat up and shoved pillows behind her back. “What’d you do with the kids, lock them in the closet?”
“They’re watching Yo Gabba Gabba! I think Jeremy’s got a crush on Foofa.”
Katie took a bite of toast. “Which one’s that?”
“The pink flower bubble thing.”
“Right. Are we going to church?”
“We’d better. We missed the last two Sundays. We can hit the nine o’clock, then take the kids to the park afterward.”
“Okay, I’ll make myself pretty.”
“Done,” Hank said, and headed for the door. “I’m going to let them out of the closet now.”
Katie was down the stairs, dressed, her hair and makeup done, even before Hank was ready for shoes. Their oldest, Josh, could tie his own, but not so with Amanda and Jeremy, so Hank took one and Katie took the other, and then they were up and moving, looking for their coats and car keys, making sure the back door was locked....
“We’re going to be late,” Katie called.
Hank checked his watch. “Not quite a quarter till. We’ll be there in five minutes. Okay, kids, let’s get a move on. ...”
Then they were out the door.
Half a block north and west of the church, Kaseke was sitting on a bus bench, sipping his third cup of coffee of the day. From this angle he had a perfect vantage point of the front steps. There. The front doors opened, and people began emerging. Kaseke checked his watch: 8:48. Now from the path leading around the church to the rear parking lot came a line of nine a.m. worshippers. Leading the group was a young couple with three children, two boys and a girl, all three holding hands as they skipped ahead of their parents. Kaseke squeezed his eyes shut and asked Allah for strength. This was necessary. And the children, small as they were, would be killed instantly, so quickly that the pain wouldn’t have time to register in their minds.
The incoming group reached the end of the path, where it joined the common area around the steps.
Kaseke checked his watch. Less than a minute now.
A hundred yards from where he’d planted the mine, he could not see that his plan was unraveling, and it would only be later, after he was captured, that the police would explain how he’d failed.
For the past five hours, as the Claymore sat first in the rain and then in the early morning sun, the candle wax Kaseke had used to cement the rat-poison pellets to the ball bearings and their resin base began to crack. This alone wouldn’t have interfered with the mine’s function, but what Kaseke didn’t know was that this particular Claymore mine and eight others were more than two decades old and had spent the last eight years improperly stored either in a wooden box in a damp cave or buried in the sun-baked soil of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province.
As the candle wax cracked inside the casing, the resin, far past its effective lifespan and as brittle as a fortune cookie, also cracked, but only a few millimeters. It was enough, however, to loosen the sockets in which fourteen of the ball bearings rested. With overlapping metallic tinks that no one on the church steps would hear over the babble of voices, the fourteen ball bearings broke free and dropped against the shell’s lower casing. If not for ten hours of rain that had fallen since the previous afternoon, this, too, wouldn’t have hindered the mine’s detonation, but the legs holding it upright in the soil, now softened to a mudlike consistency, succumbed to the weight of the fallen ball bearings. At 8:49:36, twenty-four seconds before detonation, Kaseke’s carefully aimed Claymore tipped forward and came to a rest at a forty-five-degree angle, half its face pointing at the dirt, the other half pointing at the concrete.
When she would awake later that day in the hospital, Katie Alvey’s first thoughts would be, My husband’s dead and I think my children are alive, followed by the realization that dumb